Otrona / Hospital

[Fred Cisin]

I was not able to get access to any of my notes to more completely answer 
Eric's question.

Short answer: NO.  Otrona did not have two different obscure numbers of 
tracks for their disk sides.  On the limited number of Otronas that I 
encountered.  What I encountered was very straight-forward WD-like 
ordinarty disk formats.  IIRC, they were 10 sectors per track, with 512 
bytes per sector.
There were 40 cylinder and 80 cylinder.
There was a CP/M, and an MS-DOS.
I don't remember what the distribution of those formats was, although I 
specifically remember a 96tpi (800k) MS-DOS.

Ironically, the first one that I saw was a doctor at a hospital.
To flog the point about portability, Otrona did an early ad with a Chaplin 
imitator trying to carry a card table with a PC on it down steps in front 
of a building (capitol?)  IBM claimed to own Chaplin (and did apparently 
pay royalties to Chaplin estate), although Chaplin himself was not a big 
fan of biug corporation.


I wasn't able to answer more fully, nor even now.  I just spent a week in 
the hospital.  giant kidney stone and massive infection.  First few days 
were intolerable levels of pain.  I am now on 2 weeks of 24/7 IV 
antibiotic infusions.  Bizarre little pump that I carry around, but, at 
least I'm carrying it around at home, instead of the hospital.
THEN, in 2 weeks? they will operate to try to remove the stone.  They are 
hoping to do it with trans-urethral laser, with lithotripsy as a fall 
back.
I had not prepared for being in the hospital, so only had a phone (Samsung 
Galaxy S4), and it wasn't until the third day that I was able to wrangel 
access to my pants (and pocket contents)
I think that I will recover.

THANK YOU to the folk who wrote to me with good wishes!

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com